Prismstumbler is a wireless LAN (WLAN) discovery tool which scans for beaconframes from accesspoints. Prismstumbler operates by constantly switching channels and monitors any frames recived on the currently selected channel.

Prismstumbler is designed to be a flexible tool to find as much information about wireless LAN installations as possible. It comes with an easy to use GTK2 frontend and is small enough to fit on a small portable system. Because of its client-sever architecture the scanner engine may be used for different frontends. An example for this is gpe-aerial, a wireless LAN access tool for GPE (see below).
The current GTK user interface is designed to work on large PC screens as well as on PDA displays. Prismstumbler uses an embedded SQL database to store network information. It is also able to create networks lists in GPSdrive format and store captured packages to pcap dump files.

Version 0.7.3 tarball.  
Version 0.7.2 tarball.  
Version 0.7.1 tarball.  
Version 0.7.0 tarball.  
Version 0.6.0 tarball.  
Version 0.5.0 tarball.  
Version 0.4.0 tarball.   
  

Prismstumbler CVS is located at cvs.handhelds.org, anonyous access is available for everyone.

CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.handhelds.org:/cvs
Password: anoncvs

Prismstumbler is modules apps/prismstumbler.
Access is also available via viewcvs.

For all that are interested in compiling for PDAs (ARM platform) the handhelds.org development cluster and the GTK2 crosstoolchains may be interesting.

Prismstumbler consists of two parts, a server (that needs to run with root privileges) and a frontend. It is easily possible to use Prismstumbler as a kind of scan engine for other software that needs to deal with wireless networks. An example for this is gpe-aerial which is a too to select wireless LANs to connect to. (see GPE website for details and screenshots.
The old HTML interface does not work anymore, if someone is interested in re-anabling it i'll provide all information that is necessary.

Versions 0.6.0 now uses a GTK interface and has a database backend (sqlite) to save data permanent.

If you got AirSnort running, just go ahead and build prismstumbler it uses no other include files than standard Linux. If not the prerequisites are the same as or AirSnort.

Prismstumbler runs under linux, and requires the hostap, hermes/orinoco (patched) or wlan-ng drivers.
This should work under 2.4 kernels, and while it may work under 2.2 kernels, we have not tested it.

To compile Prismstumbler, the following must be available:

I recommend the use version 0.1.14 and above of the wlan-ng package.
Some necessary packages are included: prism enabled libpcap and gpsd.
Current CVS code does not use autoconf/automake. Its Makefile defaults to crosscompiling for ARM platforms, but native builds should work fine too.

Prismstumbler uses the monitor mode feature of Prism2 and Orinoco (hermes) cards to perform the necessary sniffing.
These chipsets are used by the following cards:

I've been using D-Link DWL-650 and DCF-660W with great success.

Email jafer for general information about the project.
Email Florian for bugs or patches and if you would like to contribute.

Feel free to join the project..